Hallowe’en Party by Agatha Christie (1969)
Laura’s Rating: 1.5/5 Stars
I wanted to read this festively titled book in October to get me in the Halloween mood, but beyond the first few chapters, there is almost no reference to Halloween or the spooky season whatsoever. This particular novel of Christie’s received negative reviews both at the time of publication and several decades later, being thought of as disappointing. I’d have to agree that while not utterly terrible, Hallowe’en Party is easily my least favorite Agatha Christie book I’ve read.
The Analysis:
The book features renowned detective Hercule Poirot, brought in by his friend, Ariadne Oliver, to solve a murder. While attending a children’s Halloween party with her friend, a young girl who claimed to have witnessed a murder winds up dead. Poirot must navigate small town gossip and uncover years worth of crimes to find the killer before they strike again.
Ariadne Oliver, is a famous mystery novelist and vaguely seems to be Christie’s attempt to write herself into her books, which is fun (the character appears in seven Poirot novels). The setting of a small community rife with gossip functions as a way to throw in many conversations that provide both important information and red herrings for the reader. Despite the setting and interesting character setup, the book fell short of my expectations. Christie’s novels are usually meticulously laid out, with just enough clues to make the reveal at the end unexpected yet believable. In contrast, this book felt sloppy and thrown together. It was slow moving in the beginning, with long tangents about gardening and Poirot’s earlier cases from other books. There were several conversation topics that felt repetitive, including the increased rate of crime in recent years and the issue of how to deal with mental illness now that many state hospitals were closing. While those topics may have been relevant to the time in which the book was written, the themes felt redundant and the conversations never developed past the initial idea.
Once the book began to pick up a bit, it immediately became convoluted. There are too many characters brought into the mix, each with a set of rather complicated relationships and motives. Even with a ton of possible suspects, Hallowe’en Party teetered on the edge of predictable and the reveal at the end was anticlimactic, not coming together in a way that felt satisfying. The novel really feels like a first draft in my opinion. The plot and characters are adequately laid out, but it lacks the polish and finesse of other Christie books. I’d skip this one and read Murder on the Orient Express or And Then There Were None instead.
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